are u listening to these 2, handsome Jesus?

listen to Ethel Cain while reading this

2015, ILOCOS

When they met, Venus wasn’t yet named Venus, still wrestling with a body that only queerness could understand, one budding under the ribcage of adolescence. Julio, on the other hand, sat with the feeling that he was older than the world, older than the kids rocking on the swings, and older than his drunken father’s infantilized version of fabricated maturity. Both were grappling with the shifting tectonic plates of volt-age, and the light bounced off the Barbie-pink apartment complex. It submerged them in a dreamworld carnival haze that felt trivial compared to their stifling problems.

Julio sat beside Venus on the weathered bench, the overgrown grass tickling their shins with summery dew. Venus looked at him with sharpened precision, raising her brow as Julio began to hum an unfamiliar tune his mother used to sing, back when she hadn’t yet run away to a better life.

Venus hissed against the melody. “Can you stop humming that ridiculous commercial tone? You sound so stupid.”

Julio was bewildered by the sudden insult from a stranger, angered even more by the prickly spit of her words tainting a memory he held dear.

His nostrils flared, prompting Venus to smirk. He shot back with a ratty insult, one cleaved from his father’s stash of misogynistic expletives, often hurled in his wife's absence:

“Bitch.”

The afternoon sun caught Venus’ hair, making it glitter as she scoffed at his profanity. She flipped it with practiced grandeur and retorted, “Idiot rascal with musty hair.”

Julio clenched his fists and stood over her, masked in a bravado he'd rehearsed in front of the mirror, a mimicry of manhood picked up from watching his father attack a drunken kumpadre.

Venus rolled her eyes. She didn’t show the tremble brewing beneath. Instead, she scoured through memories of TV shows, looking for a defense to blot out his masculinized façade. Julio furrowed his brows. Venus crossed her legs without a care and stared him down with full-on, withered fierceness.

When he realized that none of his father’s masculine grandiosity could topple the brat’s stern exterior, he yelled in her face as a last resort, “You calling my hair musty? Your whole aura smells like expired milk, bro.” He punched the air and smirked when Venus finally cracked.

Her thick, flat brows offset into a sharp V, and she stood gloriously tall in the bejeweled sandals she’d stolen from her cousin’s doorstep. The height difference made her towering as she scrutinized Julio down to his soul. She squared her shoulders the way queen bees did in her older cousin’s chick flicks and savored the moment he flinched under her glare.

“Expired milk? That’s rich coming from someone who smells like they bathe in their own farts and think it’s cologne.” She feigned a sad expression to deliver the dig.

Julio scrambled to recover from her power play and jabbed back, “You got all that attitude and still no friends to back it up.”

She cocked her head to the side and fanned herself with her fingers. Julio stared at the glimmering bracelets twinkling on her bony wrists, astonished by the realization that he’d finally found his match.

“Keep talking like that. Maybe someday someone’ll actually laugh, not 'cause you're funny, but 'cause you’re embarrassing.”

Everything about Venus felt like an artifact of her runaway mother. Julio couldn’t help but laugh, genuinely, at her performative gestures. She reminded him so much of how his mom used to laugh at Grandmama’s sarcastic comments, shameless and roaring, thunderous in the face of their hypocrisy. The way Venus flipped her hair was such a Mom antic, something he missed without knowing until now.

Before he could stop it, his giggles cracked into sobs.Three years had blurred past, and he hadn’t seen a single golden remnant of his mother; where she was, where she might be, or what her life had become after the escape. He didn’t blame her for leaving. But on empty nights, she made him hate himself for ever questioning the sepia-colored portrait of Jesus, wondering what he had done wrong to make her go.

Astounded by the unexpected twist of events and power-heeled from making a boy cry, Venus suddenly felt guilty for thinking she'd won a banter war. She crouched beside the boy whose name she didn’t yet know. Trying to put her painted toes in her Mama’s shoes, she mustered the courage to wrap her arms around him.

Sobs wracked his brown-sunned body, and before she knew it, his snotty face was buried in her shoulder, lamenting his grief. “I miss my Mom. I wish I could see her again. I miss her so much.”

“I’m sure you will see her someday, wherever she is.” Venus was proud of herself for using the right verb tense. It was something her Mama always reminded her of: don’t assume people are dead in conversations. Use the present tense, always.

She hugged the boy tighter and felt his tears soak into her ugly Blue’s Clues blouse. She didn’t care much for it; the shade of blue clashed with her skin, and the fabric felt itchy and tight. It was something she was forced to wear, while she longed instead for frills, tulle, and pink.

He felt his heart thudding against the fragile shell of his made-up maturity, his tears a reminder that he was still young. The soft arms of the girl around him made the chaos inside him quieter. Venus felt the caged grief rising in him, its climax splintering his body into a much-needed release.

The sound of kids playing turned mournful in those seconds of grief, in that aching need for a motherly touch. The mildew, the grass, the allergen pollen, the grasshoppers, the ice cream truck’s bell, and the rusted creak of the playground became a mottled backdrop to the two of them. They didn’t know it yet, but this moment would mark the genesis of a friendship and an alliance. The Barbie-pink apartment stood witness to the connection, its dreamworld light casting the tangled pair in soft texture.

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They met again on the same bench that same week. Both had already tattooed in their memories the banter, the hug, and the awkward aftermath of it all, but they never shied away from discussing it. One had already ripped open their chest to reveal a fluttering heart made of broken things, so there was no need for a segue from that vulnerability anymore. Venus didn’t comment on it, though. She had learned early on that masculinity was feeble when picked at the wrong scab, and Julio’s crying was a scab she wasn’t willing to pry apart.

Julio sat beside her with a smirk, watching her bathe in the sun as she pinched her brows like a maldita. They talked about the weather at first, to which Venus dismissed as a boring topic. Julio giggled at the sassiness, and Venus only raised a brow at the rascal.

Julio scrambled for something better to talk about, but realized the silence between them was an ethereal touch. It wasn’t awkward, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable either. As the sun blushed against the horizon, Venus’s shadows still managed to steal some of the golden light, bronzing him where he sat beside her.

It was their yin-yang dynamic, and he preferred it. Venus, glowing next to him, sunburned yet still cross-legged, costuming herself as one of the girls from TV. Julio, cast in a chiaroscuro of gray, fiddling with his fingers like he was waiting for something extraordinary to happen.

That’s when it hit him: he didn’t even know her name.

When he asked, she didn’t answer. The fear of branding herself anew weighed heavily on her. Lady Gaga did it, and it was a success. Most pop artists rebranded from their legal names and soared into the wings of recognition. But Venus was scared that by calling herself Venus, she’d be discarding the eight months of hardship her mother endured just to chuck her into the world.

She wanted to say it. Venus. But something was lodged in her throat. Julio looked at her like he would understand, like he could handle whatever name she wanted to give herself.

So, she did.

“Venus.”

He didn’t say anything. He simmered at the word, thinking of the universe upon hearing it. Uttering the name on his tongue felt so cottony, and he smiled at her. “I remember Mom telling me that Venus is a goddess, but I forgot what.”

Venus exhaled her old identity, the dead name, and felt the sting of tears from the genuineness Julio had shown her. That kind of kindness was unusual for boys like him, boys raised with split viewpoints on what a human being could be. Venus hadn’t yet learned the word for what she was feeling, but already, she felt like a castrated version of the boy her Mama expected her to be.

“What about you?” Venus asked, deflecting him from digging too deep into the layers of her name.

“Julio. I know, don’t laugh. It’s like an old name.” He broke into his own laughter, but Venus found the name metallic, like cigarette smoke and grease. The scent of the nice, hardworking men in her family.

She shrugged at his self-deprecation. “It’s a nice name. Reminds me of my Grandpapa.”

“Exactly my point.” He bumped her shoulder with his as they sat in silence, watching the world around them move.

Julio talked about his mom, and Venus listened. Throughout the conversation, she deduced that Julio’s mother was made of poetry, like the kind romcom leading men loved to quote. There was sun in her heart, constantly shining despite the palpitating darkness that encased her.

Julio told her about his father – the way he drank ounces of alcohol like he was purging something vile out of his body. Venus thought to herself: a poison can’t be vomited out if the person is the poison.

He stitched nostalgic memories of childhood into their conversation: the way his mom would squeeze his cheeks when he did something cute, or how she read novels on their cramped porch during the summer, humming his favorite commercial song. And then came the epilogue: her running away, escaping the knuckled abuse of her husband. Julio didn’t shy away from the grit.

Venus smiled at him sadly, not pitifully, and said, “Your father is a douchebag, and your mom probably ran away because of him, not because of you.”

Julio laughed at the word douchebag. He silently agreed, but still felt like he was the missing piece in his mother’s need to escape. “Are you suggesting I stop asking handsome Jesus whether I was the reason Mom left?”

Venus made a face at his comment, which earned another giggle from Julio.

“Girl, did you just call Jesus handsome? But yes. Stop doing that. Blaming yourself, I mean.”

Both marinated in the silence that followed. Julio’s throat was sandpaper-rough from all the talking, so he nudged Venus to share something about her life, too.

In those nanoseconds, Venus didn’t know what to say. No one had ever really asked her what she wanted. When she slid out of her Mama, sinuous and wrapped in the neon liquid of motherhood, her mother had already lauded him as the man of the family. Against the sweat, the antiseptic odor, the blue scrubs, and the coppery coat of blood on her newborn skin, Venus had begun to feel the weight of boyhood, the pressure cracking her chest open to wail loudly for help from any divine.

Of course, she couldn’t tell Julio that. There was dramatization in the way she viewed the world, and it was the only way she could make sense of everything. The hyperbolic lens was her antidote to the pressing reality that her Mama would be disappointed if she claimed herself as Venus.

“Have you ever watched TV and thought, that person on the screen is exactly me? Like that moment you recognize someone on the street and they just feel like home?”

Julio didn’t understand the question, but he knew the feeling. So he nodded.

“That’s what I felt when I saw Beyoncé performing. I am her. Or at least, I want to be her.” Venus put it indirectly, softening the truth for Julio. What she really meant was: I want to be a girl like Beyoncé. Long hair, glittering skin, a curvaceous shape, thick lips, lashes that could make men burn the world, everything a natural girl would have.

He thought about it, about the allegory of becoming Beyoncé. He still didn’t fully get why Venus would want to be her when she was already beautiful. Her confession didn’t feel wrong or dirty, but it landed heavy. Like the feeling of fingertips grazing a trigger. He looked at her, question in his eyes.

She sighed.

“I want to be a girl, Julio.” She announced it with the certainty of someone who just knew. Julio recognized the teeth behind that allegiance to herself, and he respected it more than anything in the world. That sureness was stability, something he didn’t possess. It was what his mom called star quality on the dreamer contestants in her favorite reality show, and what his father deemed brusque in the scarred tissue of boxers on cable. Both sacred things were envied, imitated, held tightly by those who just knew themselves.

He looked at her in a different light. The deformities of boyhood, protrusions that stood in the way of her bloom into girlhood, blurred. The sharp line on her jaw, maybe a memorial gift from her father. The wide shoulders, aching to stretch into swan wings. The eyes that twinkled with manhood’s residue. All of it softened like a smear of Vaseline when Julio finally saw Venus for what she was: the beauty in the way she furrowed her brows, the precision of her lips when she smirked, the way her semi-long hair glittered like crow feathers under the sun.

Venus stared back at him, softer this time. The rustic pretense of an acerbic teengirl fell away. She dropped the chromatic defense of mean girl sass and shed the sharpness she’d always carried like armor. She remembered the first time she saw herself, it felt like yesterday, but it had already been years. Crystallized in the noughties era, a boy becoming a changeling. The birth of astrology, the end-of-the-world panic, the millennial pause, and the golden age of new voices. Everyone was finding themselves in that diamond-glossed time, but Venus was just sprouting wings from her spine.

It happened in the cubic glow of the television. Beyoncé was on screen, detonating every frame like a storm. The camera panned closer, and that girl from the 2000s, the one Mama sold herself to God for, was radiant, unstoppable, exact. The music bent to her movement. Precise, calculated, like the geometry Venus had just colored in her notebook. Hips swaying, moves locked in beat. She was a metronome.

Mama was calling from the kitchen for dinner. The smell of sweet camote and the homely stench of daing filled the air, but Venus was elsewhere. Her head swiveled just in time to catch Beyoncé’s honey-blonde hair flip, a punctuation mark at the end of each verse. And when she stared directly into the camera, the TV seemed to breathe with Venus’ ragged chest. Saturated. Alive.

It felt like Beyoncé knew her. That gaze reached inside, clutched her heart, and sang to it: You are me. Not him.

And Mama, cooing from the kitchen, as she watched Venus mirror the same steps as the full grown butterfly onscreen. Clapping her hands, baptizing Venus as a dancer. Her shoulders were shimmying. Her bones copied the glorious skeleton of God on the TV. If only her Mama had known what was happening, if only she knew Venus was metamorphosing, she wouldn’t have cheered.

Venus told this story to Julio, who listened intently, without judgment. He cradled every word she spoke with care, the same way he once handled the newly hatched birds from the backyard tree. He had devoted himself to them like religion, digging up worms for the squealing chicks to eat. And now, he was doing the same thing again: caring for something with his whole heart.

He held Venus’ hands, his silence a quiet confirmation that he understood. He didn’t know what to say, but he hoped he could translate his thoughts into the way he looked at her, into the way he gently traced the inside of her palms. It was his coded language, his way of saying: I see you.

At fourteen, Julio understood that being a man meant this. And in a self-afflicted need, he hoped he was making his mom proud, wherever she was.

His masculinity had first been wired through his father’s antenna, pasteurized in violent antipathy. The memory of his father slitting a hen’s neck without flinching, teaching him to grip the bony claws to keep the animal from convulsing, the blood threatening to splatter – those were his first lessons. But his real idea of manhood had also been stitched together by his mother’s gentleness: the way she read him fairy tales, fables, and her own made-up stories about city life before she ever met his father. It was in how she held his hands, let him dance around the living room while his dad drank outside with the boys. It was in how they grew roses with quiet patience. In the way she cried silently at midnight, thinking he was already asleep.

Julio didn’t know how to put all that care into words, so he came up with something absurd to prove it. Something simple and stupid and sincere.

“V,” he said, “I’m gonna do something to make you feel more like a girl. But I need you to say yes.”

Venus, glittered in the shards of her vulnerability, nodded.

And on that same bench, behind the Barbie-pink apartment, all submerged in dream, Julio kissed her. The view of the abandoned town park, with its neon colors snaked in veins and the mottled watercolor skyline, thrummed in rhythm with their kiss. Julio wanted her to feel like a girl, and maybe a kiss would prove the solid idea that she was a princess, but he didn’t know if it would work.

Venus was surprised by it, and slapped him across the face. She was smiling, though.

Julio felt electric for the first time, even as his cheeks burned.

“God, did you even toothbrush?” Venus giggled. And in a stupid, glossy way, she felt like the Venus she could be. Like the girls on TV, wooed by handsome men, cooed over by jocks. She felt, for the first time, like a girl who could be loved by a boy.

“Just wanted to make you feel better,” Julio said, chiding as a joke. Venus slapped his shoulder.

“You just stole my first kiss, idiot.” She rolled her eyes, but she could still taste the bubblegum Chapstick and the summer air.

“Well, just doing my duties.” Julio saluted her and winked.

And Venus, for the first time, was smiling like the girl next door.